UT3 Won't Ship With Cross-Platform Play

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Epic's Mark Rein makes it official in an online chat with fans.

By Ryan Geddes

Unreal Tournament 3 will not have cross-platform play between the PlayStation 3 and PC out of the box, Epic Games president Mark Rein told members of the BeyondUnreal.com community in a wide-ranging online chat between Unreal fans and Epic employees.

In a transcript of the IRC chat posted today, Rein told BeyondUnreal that synchronizing the PS3 build and PC builds of the game to allow cross-platform play would hamper the company's ability to respond quickly to issues that might crop up on the PC side (read: cheats and exploits.)

The Epic prez grabbed a soda and elaborated:

"We looked at how this would impact our ability to respond quickly to things happening at internet speed on the PC side of the equation and realized that would not be in the best interests of our very loyal PC user base because we would constantly be holding on to updates to wait until they passed cert on the console platform," Rein wrote.

Rein did not rule out future cross-platform UT3 compatibility, after the game stabilizes a bit and gets some early updates.

Other topics discussed by the Epic crew include the UT3 demo date (there isn't one yet), the contents of the game's Collector's Edition (behind-the-scenes vids, 3D tutorials) and the amount of time between sniper reloads (1.2 seconds).